By Robert Johansen

Does the United States need the United Nations?

If we are satisfied with a world that has no international laws to discourage terrorism and war, and a world where people intent on ethnic cleansing may brutally kill others without effective international efforts to stop them, then we may not need the UN.

But if we want a world with rules that specify when using military force is legitimate and when it is not, a world with laws to stop terrorism and the spread of weapons of mass destruction, then we need the United Nations. If we want to prevent pandemics and help the one-half of the world's people who now lack food and safe water to rise out of poverty, then the UN is a necessity. We can no longer ignore the need for some global governance if we want to succeed in addressing our most pressing international problems. If the UN did not exist, something like it would need to be created.

"But," you might say, "the United Nations seems ineffective sometimes, and recently it has been criticized for poor management of the oil-for-food program in Iraq." That's true. Like all political institutions, the UN needs to be watched carefully to prevent corruption and to make it more effective. Yet, despite its flaws, the UN enables us to do much more than we could do without it. And if we support UN reform, its weaknesses can be replaced with new strengths.

Because the United Nations is the only organization able to provide a rule of law for all of humanity, we should make it more effective rather than undermine it. We need the benefits that the United Nations provides for U.S. citizens. Let me mention three.

First, the UN gets other countries to share the burdens of fighting disease, building schools, and enforcing international laws against terrorism, war, and gross violations of human rights. Burden sharing expands by twenty fold what the United States could do alone. UN peacekeeping, which has generally worked well despite some occasional difficulties, is highly cost effective. The UN spends less per year on its peacekeeping operations than New York City spends on its police and fire departments.

The cost of just ten days of the U.S. military campaign in Iraq would have paid for all UN peace operations for an entire year. And more than two-thirds of UN peacekeeping costs are paid by other countries. Unilateralism is far more expensive than its multilateral alternative.

Second, the UN establishes legitimacy for policies that protect our security. Many policies would be doomed to failure in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia if they were seen as an effort by the United States to impose its will on others, rather than as the product of a UN process that establishes worldwide legitimacy. For example, to mount the most effective and least costly humanitarian intervention to prevent genocide in places like the Darfur region of Sudan requires legitimation by the UN.

Third, some global law-making is necessary for a peaceful world. Security Council decisions to enforce peace are legally binding on every country in the world, whereas unilateral actions by the United States are binding on no one. To stop the spread of nuclear weapons will require establishing worldwide limits on those weapons and worldwide inspection to ensure that obligations are kept. This would need to be done by the International Atomic Energy Agency, which is a part of the UN system.

So the United Nations helps us by getting other countries to share the costs and burdens of many U.S.-supported policies, by providing the world's only authoritative voice on what constitutes the legitimate use of military force, and by upholding international laws that are absolutely necessary for maintaining peace and human rights around the world.

Robert C. Johansen
Senior fellow
Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies
University of Notre Dame

14 October 2005

Top of Page

Home > In the News > Commentaries > Does the United States need the United Nations?